News About This Theater

The AMC 30 at the Block opened in fall of 1998 at the Block of Orange. It did great business, but when “The Blair Witch Project” opened (it was one of 27 theaters that booked it), it put this theater on the headlines. The Block of Orange became a hugely popular meeting spot for teens and young adults. The theater has four large auditoriums that (that seat 575 and 400, two each), and has 26 other auditoriums with sizes that range from 90 – 270. Today, it is still one of the top three visited AMC’s in the country.

The theatre was part of a large redevelopment on the site of the former City shopping plaza (which once housed a UA). While the Block 30 went on to be extremely successful, it actually opened to modest business, as the theatre was completed well before the other businesses, forcing patrons to venture through a construction site in order to acess the theatre.

Exemplifying the concept that “location is everything” the theatre has thrived more off the highly popular outdoor mall complex than what it offers as a cinema destination. Haven been built during a more budget concious phase, that emerged shortly after the intial megaplex boom, the Block 30 is standard late 90’s AMC in design and offers nothing particularly unique, despite it’s long standing flagship status.

During construction and opening, the Block was tied in to the former AMC Mainplace 6; officing out of the theatre and maintaining joint management for a time.

I agree that business was not as great back then. But I should also note before the summer of 1999, this would play a movie that the Century 25 (2 miles away), would not played. Adult and Family movies would play at the Century 25, and the Teen and Young Adult oriented movies would play here at the Block. That’s why every single wide release movie would always get 3 – 5 screens at either theater. It wasn’t until late Summer of 1999 until all the prints were shared between the two theaters. Now the average is 2 – 3 per theater. Today, Century does better with Mature Adult films, and the Block does better with Teen and College Age movies (family movies do the best business at Downtown Disney).

Back to Business, After the Blair Witch Project, this theater became Jam Packed every weekend. Once Downtown Disney opened, this put a dent in our business, and business for family movies began to decline, but the teen movies still thrived. But once the Bella Terra theater opened, this put a dent in the business all together. Now, this is just a theater that does great business instead of Jam Packed.

Also, I like to correct an error in my first post. After: “the theater has four auditoriums” instead of “that” I should have put “in the main lobby”

It was sad to see AMC give the two largest auditoriums the ETX and LieMax treatments… Despite being top-masked, they were always GREAT screens to watch movies on. (Now, you’ll have to fork over a hefty premium.) The slightly-smaller neighboring two houses remain very nice, but don’t have quite the same wow factor. The rest of the complex has pretty crappy, small auditorium design (most houses aren’t even 200 seats, I don’t think), but somehow it avoids the ‘bulky megaplex’ feel that so many less elegantly-built Edwards of the same period are plagued by.

We had a church in one auditorium when I worked at the AMC La Jolla 12… in fact, they effectively used three auditoriums, because the neighboring two had to be kept vacant during services because the singing/music were easily heard through the walls.

The use of Theater 15 as a church appears to have been a one-time-only event, and wrapped up around 11 a.m. on Sunday 03-18-2013. The screening room was back in cinema use by noon. Apparently the congregation will be moving to a hotel conference room until it finds a permanent locale, according to the article cited above.

The walls at most AMC theaters are pretty thin so the sound does travel. Of course they set the volume so low that it is hard to hear especially when there is a large crowd. Showmanship is dead and AMC helped kill it.